For much of my life I have created one story about myself that covered over another more authentic story about my life. I did this to hide “embarrassing” facts.
Here’s one:
For decades, I worked hard to cultivate an image of being a man of the world.
In reality, I was a person who was a total local product. From the time I attended elementary school to when I finally graduated from college, I was able to walk or at most bicycle to my different schools. No college was more than three to four miles from my home.
All the schools I attended were in the suburbs of Long Beach, California. Emerson Elementary, Stanford Junior High, Millikan High, Long Beach City College, and California State University at Long Beach.
The school I was particularly embarrassed to admit to was Long Beach City College. My thinking was that sophisticated people would think I am beneath them if I say I attended a community college. That goes for the State University I graduated from as well.
My close friends in high school all took off to universities as far from Long Beach as possible. I considered the fact that I stayed back as evidence I was neither mature nor smart enough to move on. If both were not completely true, they were true enough to make the point. So I’ve tried my hardest to exclude it from biography sketches such as Wikipedia.
There is a paradox to all this. Years later when I became a management consultant, I initiated a mental exercise which helped people reach their personal and/or corporate goals. It consisted of creating a desired mental image of yourself that you pretended had already happened. You would talk like you had already achieved it.
You didn’t permit yourself to talk about what you had or had not been, only what you are now with the aid of your powerful visualization.
It was a powerful psychological tool. I used it. It was the means by which I crafted a narrative of a man of the world. It resulted in a large step forward for me financially. But, as it helped me, it also hurt me. The result of my negation by means of visualization caused repression. Repression results in denial, which causes psychological conflict, because the subconscious mind is always trying to punch the truth into the conscious mind.
Consequently, I am going back and unearthing my origins. Yes, I was a local boy through and through. It’s what I was, and what I am deep down.